by J. D. Glass
I paced for a few moments, an agitated circuit around the wood floor before I walked magnetically, inevitably, over to the nightstand and opened the drawer.
They were in there, the little box of blades, sharp, fresh, deadly if used the right way and I curled my fingers around them.
“I trust you,” Cort had said, “and even if I didn’t, this is not my decision—it’s yours,” he’d said when we’d finally discussed more about the what and how and why of my first remembered journey to the Mid-Astral.
“I suspect,” he said somberly, “that while your feelings were your own, you may have been…pushed.”
“What do you mean?” I’d asked. That didn’t sound right to me—there had been such a frozen edge to the fire that had blazed through me, a cold fury that acted with what felt like total logic, the words in my head, the dare to the Universe to stop me, to answer me. I hadn’t expected It would, and especially not in the way It had.
“Hounds,” Cort answered simply. “They knew who you were before you did.”
I may not have completely understood at the time, but it wasn’t hounds that chased me when the wave crashed down, was a swirling force that knocked me off balance, crushed my chest, raced higher with its promise to drown me beneath it.
I don’t want to die, I promised whatever might listen as the first cut halted the upward rise, I have to live, I told myself as the slice stilled the whirlpool, reddened unmarked skin, and I felt the flood waters recede. I just…wanted…the hurt…to stop. And once the outside bled the way the inside tore, for a single moment? It did.
*
We were well into August, and while I still rarely left the three-story brick building we lived in, I now hardly saw Uncle Cort at all, except for our evening sessions. “Shop’s got me hopping,” he’d say, “and we’ll get even busier when we get back to London. I’ve a lot to catch up on and this is my window of time to ‘create.’”
He’d then unroll the document tube he carried and show me his designs, sketches made for custom orders. In addition to dealing with verifiably ancient weapons and artifacts, Uncle Cort was an artisan and made custom blades himself, with the metal fired in such a way that it took on multicolored hues, swords with the metal folded so finely that rivers seemed to flow down the edge. Replicas. Originals. Works of art and fancy, works of deadly utility. “I’ve a very special client who needs something…unique,” he added one night, and the smile he gave when he said it matched the great-cat flame of his eyes and made me wonder what exact sort of clients he had. I asked.
“You’ll know soon enough, dear heart, and truly, it’s not nearly as interesting as an old man makes it sound.”
He always said that, but I couldn’t really understand why—my father, a rangy fireman who’d lost his life on the job, had been only forty years old when…well, I’d lost him. Cort appeared no older than he had, yet he always spoke as if he’d been around since dirt had been invented. Elizabeth did say he was a bit older than he seemed.
But then he’d ask about my lessons and I knew, whenever he did that, that whatever he hadn’t told me yet would probably be interesting at least and more than likely hair-curling and perhaps even slightly terrifying.
“Shall we?” he asked as he got up from the table, and excusing myself to Elizabeth, I exited with him.
“How are your studies?” he asked as we rounded the landing.
I thought about that as I followed him up the stairs. “I’m learning a fair bit, I think. Lizzie”—Cort shot me a grin over his shoulder, because we both knew neither one of us would ever call her that to her face directly—“is giving my Latin a daily workout. She pronounced my French atrocious and said my Spanish is barely tolerable.”
Cort chuckled as he opened the sliding pocket doors. “You must sound like a native, then. I understand why you’re studying French, given that you’ve decided to become a European.” He smiled at me. “Any particular reason for the Spanish?” he asked, his tiger eyes glinting at me as we moved the furniture to clear a center area.
I shrugged with a casualness I tried to feel. “Studied it in high school.” He knew that. He also knew that it was the language—
“Your friend, right?”
I shrugged again.
“It’s a nice way to remember her,” he said mildly as together we moved the settee. “You may want to take a moment to perhaps remember a few others, as well.” I could feel his appraising glance as we set the legs down carefully. “How is everything else coming along?”
“Everything else” covered quite a lot of territory. Elizabeth quizzed me endlessly on each item we read and discussed, from literature to history, including Clan history. Since we were in Leeds, we were far from Scotland, though close enough, in Elizabeth’s eyes, to oblige me to learn all about it, from the Jacobite Rebellion (including the death of Duncan MacRae, whose claymore was exhibited for years in the Tower of London as “The Great Highlander’s sword”) to the dispersion of the MacRaes through the United States. This was accompanied by the promise to visit Eilean Donan Castle—bought and rebuilt by yet another MacRae after it had been in ruins for two hundred years.
Elizabeth herself held two doctorates, one in philosophy and the other in physics, and since I’d already covered more than the mere basics of science and math in high school from taking college-credit classes my senior year, she fed me quantum theory and asked me to hypothesize about ethical evolution as well as to define moral laziness versus cowardice. She also taught me how to recognize different species of what seemed to be entire forests of trees and plants, as well as how to properly care for a sword—not that Uncle Cort hadn’t already beaten her to that particular skill.
There were also lessons in manners, always manners, and not the sort that were the simple “please” and “thank you” that everyone was supposed to use, but instead a careful study, an awareness of language and tone, of posture and the messages subconsciously sent that I could in turn consciously decode, things such as observing how a person sat, whether or not they bit their nails and how far down if they did, a sign of passive-aggressiveness, anger not fully resolved, the stark fear that hid behind the most aggressive posturing, the directional shift of eyes that revealed a truth…or a lie.
With Uncle Cort, though, I learned something else entirely.
I shrugged in answer again as I moved into the cleared circle. “I’m not certain. I’ve not really done anything yet.”
“No, not today,” he said, shaking his head as I took my accustomed stance and place.
I schooled my face to impassivity and reined in my curiosity.
He walked around me once, inspecting me with a critical eye, checking to see if my stance, my body language, or even the energy field that surrounded my body betrayed any of what I felt or thought. I was almost certain it didn’t.
“Nicely done.” He smiled, then put a fist on his hip and considered me, deep dark tiger eyes probing mine. “Do you trust me?” he asked finally.
“Yes.”
He nodded, satisfied. “Good. Annie, I want you to kneel, straight up, and hold your arms straight out. Close your eyes when you do.”
I did as he asked. “Palms up,” he directed, and I did that as well. I automatically reached for the Aethyr, the level of essence that was pure energy, and in less than half a second, I was already made of the Light, within and without.
The flat weight in my hands was cool, solid under leather, two and a half, perhaps three inches wide as it covered my palms. It felt very, very familiar.
“This is yours,” Cort’s voice was low and solemn. “It will carry and cut between worlds. Use it only in the coolness of your mind, never in rage. There is a difference between rage and righteous anger—and that difference will burn you.”
I swallowed and nodded. It wasn’t heavy, yet, but I could feel the beginning, the very start of the pull in my shoulders.
“Your lesson today, and for the days that remain until your initiation, will start and e
nd here. Hold that position as you move between levels. Get used to the weight, Wielder, it’s yours by right, by blood, by the promise made before you were born and the one you’ll make again in short time. This has a history older than you know, but more importantly, it was once your grandmother’s,” and his voice thickened, grew hoarse, “before it was Logan’s—your father’s.”
*
During their initial sessions on the Astral, she had been encouraged, after becoming familiar with certain landmarks, to explore, either with Cort or on her own, the valleys and plains, to meet the beings that inhabited them. Some she recognized, recognitions that came from dreams she’d had since she was a child, others from a life different than the Material one she led. Some were people she had yet to meet, and more than a few were beings who hadn’t been incarnate in ages as humans measured time and wouldn’t be for ages more to come.
There was a flexibility there that simply did not, could not, exist in the Material world. The fixed form was traded for function—wings that beat with power and strained the muscles of a very physically felt chest, arms that became legs and hands, paws beneath which the ground sped by with satisfying solid thumps, making her eyes sting.
While there were occasions when the actual physical body would be represented, the rigid structures of the flesh could be changed—male, female, human, non, at will. She enjoyed that, the freedom of it, because her body was whatever she wanted it to be, whenever she wanted it, and most of the time all she was aware of was its strength, its capabilities and potential.
Today, tonight, whatever time it was in the eternal twilight, she walked through a grassy field beside Cort. When they had first started working together, if she could have described herself, she would have said that she was slender but strong, not quite finely featured but discernable as female because of the curves that rose on her chest, the hair that flowed halfway down her back, not much different at all than her physical self.
Now, though, as her abilities had progressed, she had lost some of that definition, color; she walked in a body composed of light that became more and more featureless as she grew in her command of craft, in her comfort level outside of the Material.
“Every bit of matter has a frequency, a vibration,” Cort told her as they approached a place she’d not seen before. “Flesh, blood, rock, water…they all have energy.”
She nodded. She had learned some of this already.
“The higher the vibration, the less muted by interference, static if you will, the purer the energy,” he continued as they crossed a ridge. “That higher level of vibration will allow you to cross to other levels of the Astral.” He stopped and gazed before him and she followed suit.
They had come to a valley of mixed woods and plains, where even the wind in the twilight carried the scent of near spring.
“Except for Star Bridge?” she asked, remembering her first visit.
He put a hand on her shoulder. “When you are free, completely free of the Material, of the lower vibrations emanating from the flesh, then and only then can you cross that bridge.”
Affection flowed from him to her, an affection she returned as she stared down at the valley with him and considered what staying halfway across the span would have meant.
“Are we going there?” she asked, pointing below.
“You are,” he told her, “if you can.”
She took a few steps forward, then stopped when she realized he didn’t walk with her and she looked back at him.
“Go. And if you can enter, remember what you find. I’ll come for you when it’s time.”
She mentally girded herself and strode forward, down through the waist-high grass that tickled under her hands, down until the ground leveled, the first clearing before the stand of trees, and there…she discovered the wolf pack.
They were huge, noble-looking animals, perhaps twenty or so, a range of sizes and musculatures, with fur ranging from the purest white to gold to the inkiest velvet black, and they welcomed her among them in gestures, in sendings, told her she was one of them, a familiar friend, if she chose.
When the cry had risen among them, a joyful cry that called them to chase, the tide rose in her own blood, a heady wilding surge, and, one with her brothers, her sisters, the silken glide of their fur, of skin, of earth and wind and leaves against her, they ran.
“Now,” Cort said next to her and—
“Does it always have to be this uncomfortable?” I asked him, my eyes still closed. My head was filled with a wringing nausea that racked through me, while the dull beginning of what felt like a bruise in my lower back spread through my stomach into the top of my thighs.
He already had crouched beside me, glass of water in hand. “That should ease, eventually,” he said as I set the sword down and took the glass from him. “Do you want to continue or call it a night?” he asked while I sipped.
I circled one shoulder around and then the other to ease any potential stiffness. The nausea had slipped back to a level I could ignore, and as for the pain that dozed fitfully in my lower back, well, I’d hurt myself worse. “Keep going,” I told him and gave him a small grin. I could handle it.
“Good,” he said, “this time, bring it with you,” he told me, nodding at the sword in my hands as once again I raised my arms, closed my eyes, and was
back to the level of Astral she was familiar with, she stood alone in a circle drawn on the grass, and a glow of light was all that stood between her and them. They were shadows, misshapen humans with wolven heads, vultures with human faces, other similarly repulsive beings she didn’t recognize. Membranous wings and skeletal bodies, shapes she’d known previously only in nightmares. They shrieked and cawed at her, called curses and made rending gestures.
The sword was Light in her hand, glowed so brightly she could barely make out its internal structure through the white blaze. Light. White light. That was the energy she worked with, had been taught to seek.
“The energy that comes from the Light is pure, undiluted if you will,” Elizabeth had explained, “and the source of energy matters because when you receive it, use it, it filters through your own body, flowing along nerve and muscle channels—and impurities can block those, build within you and cause actual physical harm.”
In the exercises she ran through with Cort, she’d learned even more. “It is the stuff of pure potential,” he told her as they moved through the same katas and forms they had before, only this time she’d been asked to “carry” the sword through. She had, successfully, and she couldn’t resist the sense of satisfaction that filled her even as she blocked and feinted.
“It is what makes you and me, the Aethyr and the Astral, the Material manifest…all of it, and all of it perfect,” he said as his weapon hissed in an arc over her head and she countered. “It is not to be used improperly. And here,” he signaled to her that they were to stop sparring for the moment, “here is the first place that you will meet those that would do that. Draw the Circle around you,” he said and watched as she did.
It was a simple line she drew in the grass with the tip of the blade, a line that glowed with the Light that made it, defined it.
“No matter what you see, no matter what you hear,” he began, and gestured about them as she stood within it. A shiver ran through her, setting her teeth on edge even as she controlled it, composed her face, her stance. “Don’t engage, and don’t leave the Circle.”
And then…they came, came as if called. They threw images at her, taunted her, called her by a name she didn’t recognize, threatened her, and still she stood in the bright band that surrounded her, guarded her, kept her safe. “You cannot be forced out,” Cort’s voice sounded in her head, “and you must not allow yourself to be drawn—unless they violate your guard—and that must not happen. This is your first test.”
She knew he guarded her body, monitored it with his sense, a floating of hands above her to check her pulse, to ensure the clarity of channels. He heard and watched her heart
beat, her blood flow, and if the need arose, he had the ability to envision and affect the very cells of her body. And he’d promised that she’d learn that too. Once she was sworn.
But to get there, she had to pass through the gauntlet, the testing, and this was her first challenge: to maintain her stance in the circle, to resist the temptation to fight. She instinctively understood the necessity of this first basic test. To master fear was to control anger, to allow the higher function of the mind to rule. This was the foundation of discipline, of law and order, of civilization. She could be of no use to the Light if she couldn’t first master her own darkness.
Then came the sendings: visions, images, tactile, visceral, filled with smoke and blood and fire and pain…images of lives already lived, of possibilities that could yet become realities, threatened promises. The first image was another life, a mountain, a woman, herself, Nina, older, different…there was a sound like thunder and it ripped through Ann’s chest, and cordite stung her nose and eyes even as she felt the hard smack of a wood floor on her back. There was a child taken, another tear of pain that dug deeper than the bullet had. There were men and women in furs with spears, exotic figures with eyes that glowed, emeralds, opals, flashes of nickel silver, beautiful mouths that drank human blood, sucked on human feeling, and she watched it move through their bodies in sluggish eddies of gray light…energy…force…and she recognized them for what they were: soul eaters.
There was more, snatches of bits through time: she was male, female, shifting from one life to another, different times, different bodies, different lives and all of them hers.
She watched her father die, and die again, a blaze of angry orange and billowing black, the smoke choking her with hands that wrapped around her throat, the blistering heat blinding. She heard the raw laughter that followed his death, and it felt like her own body would melt with tears.
